Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: CountBuggula on April 01, 2015, 02:32:08 pm
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After much behind-the scenes work and deliberation, I'm excited to finally be able to announce a major change to Fate of the Galaxy. As we neared the possibility of our first release, it became increasingly clear that the FreeSpace Open engine (SCP) is limited in some fundamental ways that preclude our ability to launch the game as we envision. As many of the problems are central to the engine itself and would require significant recoding, we've decided to switch game engines to a more established, flexible, fully featured, and GPL-licensed game engine: dhewm3 (https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3).
Dhewm3 is a fork of the ID Tech 4 engine initially used in Doom3, but with some significant additions such as full SDL support, elimination of OS-specific code, and OpenAL for audio. There are some great implications to all this:
- Full cross-platform capability for Linux, Mac, and Windows (no change)
- Freedom from the SCP's restrictive license
- Improved graphics capability such as self-shadowing and height/displacement maps
- Fully featured low-latency netcode for multiplayer
- Native support for multiple joysticks
Since we already have all of the visual assets required for a release, we've already been able to start porting them to the new engine and working on custom code for the flight model. Thanks to Zookeeper and Chief1983 working tirelessly on the code portion, we're already looking at good results and hope to have a working alpha build within a few months. While this means we won't have a release of FotG this year, we're confident that our ultimate release will far exceed the capabilities of our current version. Gameplay mechanics will match what we've established in the SCP so our campaign missions can also be ported directly with minimal effort.
I'd like to thank the community for supporting us during development and look forward to having screenshots and videos from the new engine to show you.
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Seems completely legit.
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We have our very first screenshot (http://i.imgur.com/GOiy3nA.gif) in the new engine ready for you!
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/tip hat
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I've been notified by several people that apparently I was entirely too convincing in my little joke. My apologies. I realized after I made the post that I should've included the link to the screenshot in the first post, but it was too late.
That doesn't mean that I don't still think it would be pretty cool to be able to do what I wrote up there, but given our current resources and level of expertise that just ain't in the cards. Maybe...maybe someday we'll make a FotG 2 in a new engine. Until then, SCP is our home.
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Have you considering GameMaker
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Uaw, this is an important decision, but surely it will bring good things to all of us, even a nice Death Star :D
Good luck ! :yes:
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The screenshot gives a very clear picture of the direction they chose to go in with this. I for one approve. :)
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I wanted to ask if they will keep all the features of a Space Sim ( more or less ), i mean weapon control, shields, flares, tactics, etc.... :)
I'm sad that the new engine may be doesn´t have a nice mission editor like FRED, so we can´t enjoy building missions right ? :(
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Pssst: check the date of the first post!
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(http://i57.tinypic.com/34q5i8o.png)
EDIT: ninja'd
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I don't know... the screenshot is actually very convincing.